Friday, October 23, 2015

I've been aware of the Dynamics GP Visual Studio Tools "Dictionary Assembly Generator" (dag.exe) for quite a while, but surprisingly I've never had to use it before. I haven't had to use VS Tools with modified windows or third party dictionaries, so I've always been able to just access the standard GP forms with VS Tools.

But I have a new project where I need to access some modified GP windows, so I need to use the DAG to get to the custom fields.

The client is on GP 2015, so I get the VS Tools SDK installed on my GP 2015 server, get the command line setup, and then run the DAG.

And I get a dag-splosion. (dag-plosion?)

It starts up okay and looks like it's working fine, but then at the "Generating IL code" step, around 69%, kaboom.

I had GP 2015 R2 (14.00.0725) installed from the R2 iso, and had installed the VS Tools SDK from that iso. I tried installing the latest October hotfix (14.00.0817), but that didn't help.

My next random test will be to downgrade and try installing the VS Tools SDK and perhaps also GP 2015 from the RTM iso.

Otherwise, I've got nothin'.

If anyone has any suggestions, I'm all ears...

UPDATE: I found a few forum posts with a similar DAG problem (but different GP versions), and those threads mentioned having to copy some files from the GP or AddIns directory into the VS Tools SDK folder to get the DAG to work. David Musgrave also indicated that in his case, he had to copy the BusinessObjects.dll file.

After trial and error and then selectively copying individual DLLs, I found that I had to copy 3 DLL files from my GP2105 folder to the VS Tools SDK folder to get the DAG to work:

With those files copied, the DAG no longer crashes for me during the Generating IL code stage.

However, when it gets to the "Creating Application.MicrosoftDynamicsGp.dll" step, the process stays at 99% for several minutes. It seems like it has hung, but it did eventually finish.

So I hope this DAG-tastic solution helps some other poor soul.

Steve Endow is a Microsoft MVP for Dynamics GP and a Dynamics
GP Certified IT Professional in Los Angeles. He is the owner of Precipio
Services, which provides Dynamics GP integrations, customizations, and
automation solutions.